Read the first sentence with which I began. I said it was simplistic, not that it was categorically and completely wrong, and certainly not that its opposite was true.
What I object to is the extraordinarily simplistic, one-dimensional view of progress peddled by the likes of Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker.
True, lot's of material and medical indicators of progress have consistently increased. That's to be celebrated. Certainly, if asked, the vast majority of people in the West would want to be born in the post-war years, and the average would probably slant towards the end of that period. Though I do think a good slice of people would choose against the post-2008 years in particular.
But that binary - better or worse? - is a crude measure of societal health. It lacks any dialectical sense of modernity, of that fact the same socio-technological expansion which brought about that progress, has gone hand-in-hand with extreme oligarchy, world war, nuclear weapons, climate change, the anthropocene. Certainly, the risks of catastrophic global breakdown are greater today than ever before.
I also think it has a superficial and philistine grasp of politics and the common good. Besides utilitarians, few political philosophers would so easily equate the good with material abundance. Hence why I pointed, by way of counterpoint, to today's secular stagnation, crisis of democracy, inequality, and withering of public life. These are not small problems, but speak to fundamental pathologies in our body politic.
> "The other two examples, undoubtedly yes they are better than ever."
Many native Americans and Greeks would viscerally disagree with you. Perhaps you're missing something?
> "For anyone to think it was better in any other time in history for most of the global population than now, shows such a lack of knowledge of history and the human condition that its hard to take serious."
As above, you have misread what I said, and I think trying to understand and evaluate society solely from the binary standard of 'better or worse' is extremely crude. I have a PhD in history btw.
>"Scrolling instagram and fake depressions aren't worse than having 7 miscarriages, half your kids dying as babies or children, being enslaved, starving to death."
True, but I think virtually no one would say otherwise. This is an unhelpful caricature of the argument I was making.